Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PC) 1/5
This is a game that manages to somehow both get more hate than it deserves and more praise than it deserves. On the one hand, it has some very impressive graphics, as evidenced here by some screenshots I took. Even if you're not a fan of realism, this is still rather stylish realism.
The gameplay has its moments. As was the case with the first Modern Warfare, my favorite missions are when you travel with Commander Price on a sniping expedition. These just feel very cool. You walk forward, find your mark, fire, and press forward to the next marks. It feels like a sniper mission should feel. It's sneaky, lethal, and the moments looking down the scope are tense because you don't want to get caught.
Another interesting thing was the final battle, which I can't talk about without spoilers so...
On the other hand, I don't like a lot of the gameplay for trying too hard to make me feel cool. The gameplay almost feels patronizing to me. When you breech a door and it goes into slow motion so you can shoot out everyone in the room, or when you run in with guns blazing into a giant battlefield shootout where you take more bullets than your enemies, but they fall and you don't... these sort of things might give some people the sense of being an uber war hero, but for me it just highlights that the game designers are holding my hand to boost my self esteem, but aren't actually challenging me. I find myself playing sloppy in this game a lot because it doesn't matter if I play sloppy. I die a lot, but very few deaths happen without hitting another checkpoint, so death doesn't really feel problematic. It's like I can see that the gameplay can be challenging, but I would have to force myself to play by rules such as if I don't pass a mission in 1 life, then I have to restart the mission. I don't care enough to do that, but the checkpoint system, regenerating health, and bullet sponge health all combine to make me a crappy soldier that just runs from point to point to further progress, or who fires from behind cover for 4 seconds, then regenerates health for 10 seconds. You could blame me for not forcing myself to play smarter, but the games rules both allow you to play sloppy, and even encourage it a bit.
As for this story, it was great to play this and Spec Ops: The Line back to back. So many similar things happen in both of those games, but where Call of Duty tries to make it all seem awesome and boost you up as a hero and defender of freedom, Spec Ops: The Line prefers to rub your nose in all the nastiness of war and it kind of hates you for playing a game about it, and it hates itself for being a game. I found it hard to take a lot of the heroics of Call of Duty seriously after just playing Spec Ops because there's an ugly side of all this warfare that CoD presents to you in a way that never really encourages you to think about it or examine your actions. Spec Ops on the other hand wants you to smell your own hypocracy and to see the futility of your actions. Call of Duty thinks you are making history and will one day end up with an installation in a museum for your heroic deeds.
